How To Open A Command Prompt Window In File Explorer On Windows 10

On older versions of Windows, when you hold down the Shift key, and right-click inside a folder, the context menu has an ‘Open Command window here‘ option. On the newer builds of Windows 10, that option has been replaced with PowerShell. You can get the Command Prompt option back however, if you use PowerShell and Command Prompt, there’s a much easier way to open a Command Prompt window in File Explorer.

Open A Command Prompt Window

The File Explorer location bar can be used to jump to any location on your hard drive, open the Control Panel, and also open Command Prompt.

Open File Explorer and navigate to the folder you need to open the Command Prompt. Click inside the location bar, and type ‘cmd’, without the quote marks. Tap the enter key and a Command Prompt window will open in that location.

The Command Prompt will open with regular user privileges so that’s a downside to this method.

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Since this method doesn’t open Command Prompt with admin rights, it has limited use. If you need command prompt with admin rights, you have to go the usual route.

You can search for Command Prompt in Windows search, right-click it, and select ‘Run as administrator’. You will then have to use the cd command to move to the folder you need to run commands in.

The other option is to use the Run box. Tap the Win+R keyboard shortcut and type cmd in the run box. Instead of tapping the Enter key, tap Ctrl+Shift+Enter to run Command Prompt in administrator mode. You can then use the cdd command to move to the folder you need to run commands in.

There used to be an option in the File menu that you could use to open a Command Prompt window with admin rights but that too has been replaced with PowerShell. If you use the little registry hack mentioned earlier to get the right-click context menu option back, you can open PowerShell from the File menu.

You can use PowerShell for most things that you use Command Prompt for. PowerShell is included by default in Windows 10. PowerShell has been around for quite a while but it had to be installed separately. Microsoft is slowly pushing PowerShell to the forefront however it’s highly unlikely that the Command Prompt will be deprecated any time soon, if ever. It’s here to stay but so is PowerShell so it’s a good idea to learn to use both. You’ll find a lot of the commands that work in Command Prompt also work in PowerShell.